


and no net ensnares me

by fascinationex



Series: bleach works by fascinationex [24]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alien Biology, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Body Horror, Non-Sexual Slavery, Other, Pre-Slash, in the form of unfree labour, it's grimdark don't @ me, rental organs, you don't need to have read the previous fics in this series to understand this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:08:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21998743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: On an uninteresting little planet in the middle of nowhere there is a factory where the workers are indentured and the product is grizzly.Yammy repays a favour. In some ways, Ulquiorra would prefer he hadn't.
Relationships: Ulquiorra Cifer & Yammy Llargo
Series: bleach works by fascinationex [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/849117
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	and no net ensnares me

**Author's Note:**

> Technically this would occur chronologically a bit before "and explosions are louder in space" in the timeline of this universe, but you don't need to have read that to read this.

Ulquiorra was not an altruistic person. In this case, he chose to intervene because he was tired and he had assessed that intervention would enable him to sleep uninterrupted before his next working shift. 

The working shifts at the reclamation factory were long, and the work was hazardous and physically demanding. Resting was critical—not to all species, but certainly to Ulquiorra’s. 

All of the workers were indentured to the Baker Group, the intergalactic manufacturer of medical and cybernetic implants. They operated a subscription service, and should the recipient of an implant be unable to continue subscription, they would be required to give up their implants, or work off their repayments in service to the group. Ulquiorra had seen plenty of cybernetic limbs and even a few minor organs returned as part of the policy. The Indenturee Repayment Plan was presented as the happy alternative to, say, dying without a specific medical implant, but few life forms were stupid enough to agree to it unless they had no other choice. 

His last shift had finished sorting through the remains left by the mechanical sorters. Looking for flashes of metal in amid the bone and congealed fluids and old meat was long, tiring work, and then somebody had to look up and identify what kind of cybernetic implant had been found against the register, and then they had to be rinsed and stacked in the carts. Either they’d be assessed to be in good condition and rented out to the next person who had need of them, or they’d be repaired or melted down. Waste not. 

Ulquiorra had heard some of the workers say that they found it disturbing to think that their own bodies would be subject to the same reclamation process once they died. Ulquiorra did not understand it: they'd be dead, they wouldn’t even know. 

The reclamation factory was the only thing of any true worth on a tiny, freezing planet called Anpan, which orbited a small, cool star at the edge of Bredtopia-controlled space. The planet was tidally locked, leaving one side of the planet bare, dry, and constantly exposed to light, while the other was an endless, icy-cold night zone. As the nearest star was also prone to massive, unpredictable flares, the factory had to remain in the night zone—the native life forms had no problem with the conditions on the hot side of the planet, but for the workers that the Baker Group regularly shipped in, it would have been fatal. 

After a successful shift, the workers got a rest cycle: eight hours off. Ulquiorra had intended to use his for rest. He was better off than many of the sorters, both in terms of his aptitude for the task and his situation—the rooms above the engines, which he shared with nine other indentured workers, were by far the warmest in the facility. It should have been easy to sleep. 

However... he could still hear the sounds of the other off-shift workers and whatever it was that they were doing outside on the grounds of the cold, dark facility. That, coupled with the ache in his back and shoulders—product of fourteen hour work shifts and extremely inadequate nutrition for a member of his species—and the scent of whatever alien had used this bunk before him, kept his aching eyes open despite his repeated efforts to power them down. 

He dozed, briefly, but the mechanical eyes crackled on without permission in response to another booming bellow from outside. They flooded Ulquiorra’s brain with signals for light that made him jolt from his fitful doze. He stared at the cracked ceiling for sixteen seconds, contemplating possible courses of action. 

Something thumped. Another yell. It didn’t sound particularly like anything he’d heard in the factory. A native life form, perhaps. 

It did not matter what it was, as long as the other workers grew bored of playing with it soon. 

Yet another wall-rattling bellow was sufficient to decide him. If he didn’t do something, his next shift would be unpleasantly taxing. And it was never a good idea to fail to meet his overseer’s schedule. She needed the extra product to bribe her own boss to look the other way while she skimmed the rations, and got cranky when it was not forthcoming. 

He peeled himself off the bed and exited, passing silently so as not to disturb the single other person in the room—an alien of a species he didn’t know, with four legs and sharp teeth in his pointed face. Somehow, he was asleep despite the noise. He was either lucky in his constitution, or so exhausted he didn’t care. 

Outside was icy, and the light of distant stars didn’t illuminate very much. But there wasn’t very much to illuminate: grey dura-crete to flatten out the ground, slightly greyer buildings all squat and ugly, and the hulking black void of a space ship with all its lights powered down, not to depart for hours yet, blocking out a chunk of starlit sky. 

Despite the low lighting obscuring the perimeter, Ulquiorra knew exactly how far he could go from the building before triggering his collar and the poisons within. The group making this racket were about as close to that border as they could reasonably get, which seemed like a poor choice. One wrong shove would end somebody. 

The noises, he had thought at first, were of someone tormenting a native animal that had been stupid enough to cross that boundary from the wilds. Most of the life forms here knew better than to hang around the compound, except for perhaps the true pests, which bred so fast it hardly mattered. 

Both food and entertainment were rare for the workers. It wouldn’t be strange for them to kill and eat anything that stumbled in. 

When Ulquiorra’s eyes cycled around with a grinding mechanical scrape his initial impression seemed to be accurate—three workers he recognised only by their collars, taking turns savagely laying into some huge, hunched animal. 

It wasn’t completely clear how the animal had been restrained until Ulquiorra saw the sparks, which crackled to life when the creature struggled. It was an electro-cable. They were used in the buildings, to keep animals out of the vents. A mechanic somewhere would be annoyed to find one missing, and probably even more annoyed to know it was being used to hold down some wretched, stupid animal, out in the cold and the dark, for entertainment. 

Ulquiorra watched for a moment with his hands tucked into his pockets. He got a glimpse of the creature’s true bulk when the electricity crackled visibly across its body. It was huge, head and shoulders above the biggest of its tormentors, and there was a—something, perhaps some kind of tail, winding and long and vaguely lacertilian. 

He’d seen plenty of things tormented and killed in his work before he lost his eyes. It hadn’t affected him much back when he’d been a cheap assassin, either positively or negatively; it simply hadn’t mattered. Now, he gave it a moment, wondering if he might feel something in response to the spectacle, get some sense of amusement out of it, like these others had. 

Hmm. No emotional response seemed forthcoming. 

Eventually, the animal gave another enormous howl of rage and pain—not, he thought, so much at being kicked again, as at the jolt the electro-cable by which it was restrained provided when it struggled. 

Ulquiorra exhaled. One of his eye implants was leaking again. He could feel it, mildly acidic, dripping from his eyelashes and down his cheek. It left an unpleasant tingling sensation in its wake. There had not been any time for maintenance. And there wouldn’t be any today, either, obviously. He was wasting time on _this_ instead. 

That _was_ a feeling, a little flush of mild irritation, stark and obvious against an otherwise sterile emotional landscape. His mouth tugged down a little and he stepped forward. 

“This is loud,” he said flatly, loud enough to carry, with the particular inflection that said ‘loud’ meant ‘irritating and provoking’. He doubted the workers would pick up on the tone itself—they didn’t have the ears for it—but they were of a social species, and would probably understand by implication. 

“Shit,” said someone, and all three of his fellow employees turned and twitched and flinched. Then, upon seeing Ulquiorra there, so small and pale and slender under the starlight, someone else added, with feeling: “ _Fuck_.” 

Ulquiorra was not completely sure why the other workers—and some of the overseers—found him unsettling. Yes, his poorly maintained cybernetic eyes leaked tears of acid right down his face, but everybody who worked here had some kind of implant. That was why they were here. 

He blinked, slowly, and with a grinding noise that throbbed in his head. 

“Uh,” said one of the workers. “Sorry. Didn’t realise it was bothering you. We can be quieter?” 

“Yes.” That seemed reasonable. Ulquiorra nodded. They, too, should get some sleep—but that was not his problem. And he didn’t know their species very well. Perhaps they needed less. 

As he retreated he heard the animal begin to curse them in a guttural but comprehensible voice. He paused. Perhaps not an animal after all, then. After half a second, he kept going. That, too, was not his problem. 

Ulquiorra went back to the bunk above the engines and laid down. After a moment, he pried his eyes out with his long nails. Blindness was a necessary trade off: the ache, and the unpleasant tingle of the acid on his face, lessened as soon as blindness set in, and he could then rest uninterrupted by stray signals from his implants. 

Thirteen minutes later, he jerked awake to darkness and the bone-shaking howl of the captive creature outside. 

Ulquiorra got up, ignoring the strain of his back and the crack of his joints. He popped his eyes back in with a sickening scrape and a sudden burst of light that made his stomach flip. He walked back outside. 

The starlight was the same. The air was still cold. And the workers were still entertaining themselves. 

Ulquiorra examined the situation. He was tired, and would need his energy for his shift, so he would have to resolve this as quickly and expediently as he could. 

The thing they were beating and taunting was bigger than them—by a lot. 

After a second’s analysis the answer seemed obvious. 

“Oh, hey, where did you come—” began one of the workers, showcasing a surprising disinclination toward situational awareness, as Ulquiorra stepped once again forward from the shadow of the building and into the starlight. 

Ulquiorra ignored him, reached out and peeled away one loop of the electro-cable. 

“Hey, shit, wait, don’t—” 

It burned his hand, and then it also burned his other hand when he grabbed it with that, too, and then because he was holding it with both hands and his feet were still on the ground, his vision crackled and sparked into static. The collar around his throat made an alarming sound of strain, but he was not going to hold the cord long enough for it to decide he was past the perimeter and kill him, so that was all right. 

Ulquiorra twisted and pulled, and the thick wires of the cord came apart with a visible crackle of light beneath his hand. Then, predictably, the whole thing went dead. 

He discarded the pieces, flexing his smoking fingers, testing. This would cause some discomfort during his shift. Less, he decided, than not having rested. 

Silently, ignoring the startled and irate yelling of the other workers, he turned and left, even as the cleverest of them caught up with current events. He could almost feel it when the first realised the danger he was in. 

Freed, the huge creature rose to its full and intimidating height, arms spread, eyes gleaming in the low light. It shed the dead loops of electro-cable as it went, roaring fit to shake the ground. 

Ulquiorra watched without comment as the faces around him contorted with sudden terror. The quickest turned to bolt. “Fuc—!” 

Unconcerned, he went back to his bed, slowly and steadily climbing the stairs for the third time that off-shift. 

The next ten minutes were, naturally, even louder than the hour preceding them. As Ulquiorra was wrapping reasonably clean rags around his hands, his peripheral vision caught the alien in the far corner cot jerk awake at a particularly pitched shriek. 

“…what’s that noise?” 

“Only refuse,” murmured Ulquiorra, for surely that was all they would be by the time anybody else made it outside to investigate. 

The alien gave him a sharp, uncomfortable look. It flicked from his blank face to his burnt hands and back again. “Shit, man,” he muttered faintly. “What’d you…” He did not finish the question. Ulquiorra felt no need to answer.

The screams ended, as Ulquiorra had expected they would. 

And the rest of the off-shift was very quiet indeed, just as Ulquiorra had intended. 

He slept.

* * *

If the overseers were in some way upset to discover that three of their workers had been killed by one of the native life forms during the night, Ulquiorra never heard anything about it. 

He attended his shift in the lowest of the body pits without incident. 

There existed ways to be moved to another level, better-ventilated, or even to be moved from the body pits to the other functions—sorting tables, supply, even skilled work like the mechanics. Ulquiorra sometimes thought he had found the energy to bribe his way to better placement, but it rarely outlasted a whole fourteen hour shift. He did not have the motivation necessary for sustained engagement with the under-table dealings that characterised the workers’ network in the facility, and he knew that a brief burst of activity, however industrious, would not have lasting effects. 

Nevertheless, the lowest body pit was a wretched place to work. 

It was one huge room with dura-crete walls and floors, all varying shades of grey even to Ulquiorra’s enhanced eyes. It had low ceilings and poor ventilation, four big slabs for whole bodies, and a series of carts on tracks that would be carried further through the factory once they were piled high with product. 

The lighting, too, was poor and low. Supposedly, it was because there was no daylight, and the whole facility operated at a minimum of light to help its workers ‘adjust’. But of course, a cursory analysis of the situation suggested multiple motives at best. It was no secret that any amount of lighting cost money. 

The bodies of those with implants were brought in and dumped on a schedule, and the lowest pit was always those who had been waiting longest to be shipped. Soft tissue was extremely compromised by that point. Ulquiorra’s sense of smell stopped working after the first ten minutes of every shift. The gasses that hung around the broad pit floor were corrosive and flammable, and they irritated the eyes—or eye sockets, in Ulquiorra’s case—and caused a host of baffling symptoms in the nervous systems of most organic species. 

The workers sharing Ulquiorra’s shift were all of hardy alien stock—two battered-looking mantid aliens with their six legs and strange eyes, a taxorian who towered over all of them and spoke nothing but his own booming and guttural tongue, and three people so extensively overhauled with implants that it was hard to say what their species had been before the surgeries. 

Their shift overseer was another, even bigger taxorian, whose horns scraped the ceiling and whose hide showed the scars of hard use over time. She was open to being bribed—anybody who was able to be an overseer usually was—but not very friendly. 

The shift was fourteen hours of pulling up the bodies, checking their IDs, cutting out the old implants and then reducing the remains for efficient destruction. It was cold but humid. Moisture from breathing and decomposition stuck to walls and structures in long dark streaks, and the work was long and demanding and it hurt. 

Six hours in, one of the cyborgs of unknown provenance heaved a body onto Ulquiorra’s slab and threw out “You didn’t really kill three guys last night,” like a challenge. 

Ulquiorra adjusted the rag tied over his burns. It did nothing to stop contamination, but the padding dulled the pressure. 

“No,” he agreed. 

The cyborg grunted like he’d known all along but was nevertheless disappointed in the answer. “Figures. Tomalkin said you got your hands all messed up killing them, but—” 

“I don’t know that person,” Ulquiorra said. He took the saw and began cutting the implantable defibrillator out of the body. It took two minutes and by the time he was done the cyborg had hauled up another body. 

“Tomalkin shares your off shift,” the cyborg prompted. “If you’re gassed, try not to die on shift. Nobody wants to pick up your slack.” 

Forgetfulness _was_ a symptom of later-stage exposure, but Ulquiorra did not believe he’d known the man’s name to begin with. He declined to comment. The body on his table had lost most of its firmness and the smell of putrefaction rose. It had an entire mechanical foot, which was at least easy to remove. 

“Hurry up,” Ulquiorra said to the cyborg. “If we’re not given rations, it will be because of you.” 

The cyborg made an irritated noise but then went to haul a new body. 

“If I don’t meet quota,” rumbled their enormous, scarred overseer, as her shadow fell over them, dark even in the low lighting, “you’re _all_ going in the furnace. A few pounds of extra _dead meat_ isn’t something anyone would notice.” 

A hollow threat, Ulquiorra knew. The overseer could get away with losing one, maybe two of her team—but not all of them. Nobody would notice the extra in the furnaces, but they would notice if she had to requisition another seven workers. It seemed to cow the cyborg, no matter how clearly fallacious. Ulquiorra did not mind. 

They finished their shift, by which time all three of the cyborgs and one of the mantids had too much fluid in their lungs to even hope to speak to Ulquiorra about such irrelevancies. The cyborgs might expire on their own, but the mantid would undoubtedly recover in his off hours. 

Their bins were checked, their rations allotted for them, and their collars were manually set to rest cycles. They had eight hours to rest. 

Ulquiorra took the first two hours to clean his eyes, finally. Then all the alarms went off and everyone’s collars beeped one warning and shocked them insensible. 

* * *

He woke with a jolt when somebody grabbed the collar. It crackled with static and released a series of disgusting smells, but it had not been made equal to the strength of whatever monstrous thing had slipped its thick fingers under the band, so tight to Ulquiorra’s throat that he could not breathe past them. It came apart with a last confused _blat_ of static and the screech of tortured metal. 

Ulquiorra sagged when he was let go. The bunk room floor was warm on his cheek. His eyes—clean for a change—rolled smoothly in their sockets. He looked up. 

The room was trashed. Actually, from a cursory glance through the doorway, it seemed as though the entire facility was trashed. The bunks were overturned and the far wall looked as though it had more or less disintegrated under pressure, covering everything with a fine layer of grey dust. Beyond that, a variety of organic fluids lined the approach and there was a suspect dripping noise coming from somewhere. 

Ulquiorra rolled gingerly. His neck felt strange, raw and vulnerable in the open air. Some crushed part of the collar had released its reservoirs of poison, but instead of being shot into his carotid, its contents dribbled down over his collar bones. A stinging line of ugly red swellings rose in their wake. 

An odd shadow, which at first Ulquiorra had simply taken to be part of the room’s new topography, shifted above him. Ulquiorra’s implanted eyes rolled and whirred to focus, and he became abruptly very aware of the other person in the room: a huge, hulking brute with arms like tree trunks and a trailing, lizardlike body and tail. His relatively humanoid torso merged seamlessly into pair upon pair of legs, all covered in the same thick, calloused skin. And... muscle. He had a very great deal of muscle, which shifted beneath his skin whenever he so much as twitched. 

As Ulquiorra thought this technically accurate but ultimately useless thought, the collar fell in pieces from the creature’s idle hands. Clearly, it hadn’t stood a chance. 

Then those hands were reaching for _him_. 

He tensed and shied away, but he was uncoordinated from the earlier shock that had rendered him unconscious. He found himself scooped up in one enormous hand and carried—not very gently, but not particularly maliciously—as the huge alien stormed back the way he’d come.

Rubble clattered under his many feet, and the swing of his extremities smacked into the walls. The light fixtures, always on their lowest setting, flickered and sparked with his thunderous passing. They went through a doorway and he knocked the sagging, swinging door off its hinges, apparently without noticing, and then swept it aside behind him with his tail. 

The gas "suppression" systems had been deployed at some point, judging by the number of grey-faced, dead workers who had been caught in the corridors when they went off, but they had no effect on the planet’s native aliens. It seemed as though this creature had killed most of what he’d encountered anyway, whether low-caste worker, overseer, or—yes, even a cleaning drone had been smashed up at some point along the way, and its jagged metal pieces littered the corridor near an intersection. 

There was a clear trail of gore, growing thicker at the parts of the building where the gas systems were not in use, and which progressed all the way to its broken entry doors. The night air came through, shockingly cold, and for a second not everything smelled of death. 

Even then, they kept going. The thunder of the alien’s footsteps seemed to vibrate along the walls. Ulquiorra’s analysis of the situation suggested that his position, grasped inside of the monster’s huge, warm hand, was a very precarious one, but largely safe from any _outside_ threat. He stayed still and passive as they went up, up into the corporate levels, where the air smelled as though it might have been filtered and the floors had at some point seen regular cleaning. The bodies here had no collars—none Ulquiorra could see, anyway, although the alien creature’s rampage had made them equally dead and in some cases it was kind of hard to tell which parts were whose. 

The air must have been filtered here, because Ulquiorra heard the filter cycle back on, low and thrumming all around, loud in the silence. It was sufficiently powerful that in minutes he could no longer smell the blood and meat. 

The executive offices had blast doors, a full foot thick and made of some expensive industrial-grade alloy, and these too had been no match for the dedicated attention of the monstrous creature—who had gone right through them, leaving one dragging on its hinges, dented like it was made of aluminium. 

The light inside was, comparatively, so bright that Ulquiorra reeled, and even the big alien carrying him as though he weighed nothing at all hesitated and shook his head, grunting unhappily at the stimulation. He adapted faster, however, for he moved forward before the glittering and spots had cleared from Ulquiorra’s eyes.

There were several long, whirring moments while his mechanical eyes tried to recalibrate, but once they had, Ulquiorra could see immediately why it was so silent. Here, too, everybody was dead—they were just dead in nicer clothes. 

The bodies went by fast with the creature’s huge strides. Then, with surprising gentleness, the huge alien shouldered open the door to the largest of the offices, spun the big executive’s chair around and planted Ulquiorra in its plush, soft seat.

Ulquiorra twisted and rearranged his limbs so he wasn’t so contorted, but then— 

The alien patted his shoulder with a hand that was roughly the size of Ulquiorra’s whole torso. He absorbed the soft touch like a blow. 

“You’re good now,” he rumbled, in a voice so deep and bottomless that it seemed to rise up from the very earth below the factory, huge and faintly tectonic. If mountain ranges spoke, they probably sounded like this. 

Ulquiorra was not particularly distressed by all this killing itself. The corpses were fresher than the ones he encountered in the daily course of his work, and he’d seen plenty of fighting before he’d lost his eyes. 

When he saw the gleam of implants in the bodies, he was half tempted to lean in and extract them. It was an automatic urge—for years he had been conditioned to see the light on an implant and scrabble fearlessly through someone's innards, like some savage little animal, to claim it, for getting enough implants in his cart meant food. He twitched, but he did not reach for it. There would be no extra rations in exchange for ripping the artificial filters out of an executive’s liver. 

“You’re the creature from the last rest cycle.” If it was upset by being referred to as a ‘creature’, it didn’t show. It was never very straightforward to gauge the intelligence of the native life forms. Before the previous night, Ulquiorra would not have been able to say whether or not they had speech. 

Even sitting in the huge comfortable chair of the executive instead of stuck in his grip, there was a sense of enormity to the alien. He blocked out the lights above and threw the whole room into shadow, and as he stared down at Ulquiorra his many legs shifted and twitched with the soft sounds of skin on skin. 

“I’m Yammy,” he said finally. 

Was that a name? A species? A state of being? Ulquiorra simply nodded. A name would seem to make the most sense, although he could not speak to the alien culture that had produced Yammy; who knew what made sense to him. He blinked his mechanical eyes and introduced himself, too, even as his cold and analytical mind ticked over behind their metal irises. 

“You freed me,” he said eventually, choosing not to get into the convoluted topic of his contract with the Baker Group just yet, “because I freed you.” 

Their situations were not truly equivalent, although Yammy could not, he recognised, have been expected to understand this. He also could not have been expected to understand the circumstances he had now caused to come into play. Ulquiorra glanced at the screens behind him, but he already knew what he’d see. The life signs blinking—left on the HUD next to the gas suppression commands, no doubt from Yammy’s initial incursion into the building—indicated that there was nobody left alive on the corporate floors, except for their own tiny blips on the map. 

There were others on the working levels, collared overseers and indenturees, but not as many as Ulquiorra might have expected. Somehow, Yammy had decimated the whole facility—either directly, or indirectly when the executive team had activated their collars or gassed them in an effort to contain that chaos. 

For all intents and purposes, Ulquiorra and Yammy were the only uncollared people remaining in the building and associated perimeter. On the surface, that suggested that Yammy’s effort to ‘free’ him had been completely successful. 

“How did you intend,” Ulquiorra wondered, without expecting much of an answer, “to account for the mercenary fleet the Baker Group is no doubt sending to retake their factory even now?” 

Yammy, it seemed clear, did not operate on a basis that had much room for any consideration outside the present and the relatively immediate future. As Ulquiorra expected, he blinked down at him stupidly. 

“Eh?” 

“I see,” Ulquiorra said. 

And he _did_ see. 

There was no doubt that they would kill anybody remaining in the facility and start again with fresh workers. The cost of supporting and rapidly replacing new workers was just built into the operations of the place; they only needed to wait for more to arrive. 

Yammy seemed to give his concern some thought. “If more come,” he said, after what seemed like a very laborious process of contemplation, “why can’t we just kill them, too?” 

Ulquiorra gave this question the consideration he thought it deserved, parted his lips to say that even the most casual analysis of the situation made that an unlikely outcome, and then paused. 

The _most casual_ analysis did not support that course of action—and yet, most of the plans that Ulquiorra had formed in the last few minutes also seemed likely to lead to his death. This was the problem when a much better-armed, more reliably-supplied, unified force with greater numbers and better training was coming to kill you—in most possible scenarios, you did indeed die. 

Abandoning the facility seemed like a good idea on the surface, since it was the facility that the Baker Group would want to retake, and not the workers themselves. But there was nowhere to which he could flee if he abandoned it. The planet itself was inhospitable to everybody but its own natives, and there was no clear way off—supplies, and even shipments of dead, were on a weekly schedule, so given that one ship had only recently left, the next shuttle wouldn’t arrive for days at least. That was too long. He did not want the facility, but he _could not_ abandon it. 

That meant he would be in direct conflict with the Baker Group. At length, he said: “...Yes.” A pause. Then, flatly, “It seems we shall have to.” 

They had few resources and supplies, and no means of improving that. What they got would dry up as soon as the Baker Group froze access to whatever account or line of credit was used to pay for deliveries to Pan. Even with full command of the defences—which were meant to keep workers in and discourage the local fauna (not, Ulquiorra assessed, looking up and up _and up_ at Yammy, that it had been very good at that)—which they may not necessarily have, they couldn’t hope to actually hold the factory against the amount of force its owners would bring down upon them. 

No doubt Yammy, stupid thing, had it in his thick skull that he was helping with this all out attack, but the reality of the situation was... somewhat more nuanced. 

Very well. They had to fight. They could not use main force, they were outnumbered and badly supplied, and they could not retreat from their position. 

Ulquiorra indicated to Yammy that they may be there some time, and began composing analyses leading to survival conditions. 

He did not bother to offer Yammy the opportunity of leaving—if he wanted to go, Ulquiorra could hardly stop him, and if he felt obliged to stay, Ulquiorra would certainly find a use for him. 

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to leave a comment and let me know if there was something you liked, that'd be cool. If not, have a good night :)


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